What Is Balkanization? The Term, Its Origins and the Region Today

For centuries, most of Southeastern Europe was part of the Ottoman Empire. As the empire weakened in the 19th century, Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania and later Albania emerged as independent states.

In the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, these states first fought together against the Ottomans and then against each other over the territory they had won. Commentators watching this splintering, and the redrawing of Europe’s map after the First World War, began to use “Balkanization” for any region breaking into small, hostile states.

The term has spread far beyond geography. Writers speak of the “balkanization” of the internet, of markets or of politics when something fragments into closed, competing pieces. In every case, it implies division and instability.

Historians have criticized the word for reinforcing stereotypes of the region as inherently divided. Maria Todorova’s book Imagining the Balkans (1997) is a well-known study of how such images were created.

For many people, the term became familiar in the 1990s, when Yugoslavia broke up. Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and later Montenegro and Kosovo became separate states, in several cases after devastating wars.

In the years after these conflicts, you could see the history at the borders, borders that had not existed a decade earlier. But you could also see the desire to rebuild, to welcome visitors and to share local culture.

The modern Balkans are largely peaceful and welcoming. Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are members of the European Union, and several neighbors are candidates. Borders are easy to cross, and a single journey can take you from Catholic Croatia through Orthodox Serbia to largely Muslim parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina in a few days.

For travelers, the region’s diversity is the reason to come, not something to fear.